


Requiem in Fire (Prelude in Ice)

by neuxue



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: AU in which female characters have agency, F/M, Gen, Major Character Undeath, also dragons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 12:30:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18992701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neuxue/pseuds/neuxue
Summary: There must always be a King of Winter, and ice to balance the fire





	Requiem in Fire (Prelude in Ice)

Arya sees it in the moment of the Night King's death, with winter shattering around her in glittering shards, in wind unleashed, and it floods her with realisation stronger than any relief. _There must always be a King of Winter._

She has learned to read truth in the gifts of her god and she sees it in his eyes as his mockery of life ends on her blade; it jars through her as if her knife has struck steel instead of ice. She pulls back, stumbling in sudden fear. She knows how to claim a face, but never has she felt a being reach so strongly for one to claim it. And yet even the idea of taking that face as her own fills her with a dread colder than any winter. This is not a face for her to claim, yet it _needs_ to be claimed and so it reaches, and all her training calls to her to respond, but by that same training she knows she cannot. By her name, she knows she cannot.

Yet even within the walls of Winterfell, she finds herself looking north. She is Arya of House Stark; she is faceless no longer, and yet that unclaimed death calls to her, the faceless face of winter demands a self, and she is the only one trained to hear it.

 _There must always be a King of Winter_.

She considers going to Bran; he has more knowledge than any should of the Night's King, of the winter beyond the Wall. But his eyes unnerve her and his knowledge unnerves her and she fears what would happen if he should decide he knows better than she what to do with an unclaimed death. He serves a being none of them know, and she is not sure it is on their side.

She does not even consider telling Sansa; Sansa's place is here in Winterfell and in the game of thrones. She knows the living; the dead are Arya's domain.

And she cannot tell Jon for the same reason she desperately needs to tell someone other than herself: Jon would feel that call too strongly, and does not have the training to understand what it is, much less to resist it. But he cannot claim that crown; she knows this as surely as she knows her name. Even thinking of it brings that feeling of wrongness, of a winter too cold and snow unending. She is trained to balance, and to break it thus is anathema.

That leaves only Daenerys, the fierce dragon queen whose eyes hold ice but whose blood and being are fire. She perhaps can hold the knowledge in balance the way no Stark could. And if she is to be queen, it is her duty to know.

"How do you know this?" Daenerys asks.

"I saw it when I killed him. I felt his death and knew his face."

If Daenerys is unnerved by Arya's words, she hides it well.

"Why did you tell me?"

"You're the queen," Arya says with a deliberately casual shrug, calculated to frighten when combined with her direct gaze and flat tone. Daenerys looks only thoughtful. She would have made a good acolyte, Arya thinks, but for the fact that she, too, knows her own name too well.

"You did not tell— Jon." There is a brief pause before the name, as if Daenerys almost spoke another.

"No. And nor will you," Arya says, holding the dragon queen's gaze. "He is too much a Stark still, and the Starks are too closely bound to the winter. If he were to claim that throne..."

"It would destroy everything; winter would reign and even dragons could not hold it back."

Arya nods, covering her surprise at Daenerys's understanding. But then, if any would know and fear the reign of ice it would be the mother of dragons.

"Thank you," Daenerys says. "I must go to King's Landing, but we will speak of this when I return."

Arya simply nods again, already planning to follow. She cannot stay here, with the call of ice in her mind and a face still unclaimed in the north, whose claiming would be her undoing.

*******

Dany wonders at the strange girl's words as she flies south, but never for a moment does she doubt them. There must always be a King of Winter, ice to balance the fire. She does not understand Arya, nor the source of her power, but she knows its truth as strongly as the truth of what she saw at the House of the Undying, of the prophecy whispered to her by Quaithe in her mask. Knows Arya speaks the truth of ice as Daenerys once knew the truth of the dragon eggs. And she remembers, too, that draw she felt to fire, even before she understood what the eggs were. She wonders if that is what Arya feels, if that is why she keeps glancing to the north, if that is why she stood in the snow with no cloak against the wind. Daenerys walked into a pyre once; she can recognise that need even in a face trained to show nothing.

She can see it all too well on Jon's face, in her mind, as she falters even in imaging speaking that terrible truth to him. And she knows, too, that Arya is right once again. Targaryen he may be, but he is of the ice as much as she is of fire. She was reborn from the pyre and he was reborn in snow, but he has found fire now, as she has seen the ice. _Together…_ she thinks, but pulls away at the pain in that wish.

He cannot hold the power and weight of winter, not without it claiming all he is, for there is nothing within him to stand against it. And so it would consume him, as it consumed the nameless Stark king before him.

Daenerys remembers Rhaegar's words, witnessed in the House of the Undying. _He is the Prince that was Promised, and his is the song of ice and fire._ Ice _and_ fire; too long it has been divided, and the world trembles for it. Fire unleashed in madness, and ice unleashed in the cold rage of winter; a kingdom divided and a land scorched and scarred, wracked by terrible winters and longing for summer yet trembling before the might of the dragon kings and their fire unfettered.

_He is the Prince that was Promised...There must always be a King of Winter..._

But High Valyrian has no gender and suddenly she knows how the song must end; the song Rhaegar never finished, the war that claimed his life and yet whose unbound threads still define all of theirs.

As she thinks her brother's name, she hears Rhaegal scream, and looks down in horror at the Iron Fleet she had been too lost in thought to see. Too lost in the past, too lost looking back, and so once more she has lost, and once more she _is_ lost, as she clings to Drogon's spine and screams her pain to the skies and flees to Dragonstone.

Dragonstone, that weathered the storm of her birth yet cannot contain her mourning. There is an emptiness within her, a place where fire and vitality has been replaced by something that feels like the ice beyond the Wall, like the ice that claimed Viserion and chained him to the King of Winter.

Is this how it will— is this how it would feel, to take that winter into her, to be remade in the image of ice?

It cannot— it could not hurt more than this.

She cannot tell Jon; he has already betrayed her, though she knows he did not intend it so. She cannot tell Tyrion; he, like Sansa, looks to this world and its politics and rulers, to threads of influence he can see and understand, and not to the powers beyond any of them.

She could have told Missandei, perhaps. _No. If I look back—_

How much more lost can she be? She is alone, surrounded by her remaining allies but even they keep their distance. Even Jon, though she cannot keep from going to him, reaching for him, desperate to share his strength if she is to face what she is ever more certain must be.

She cannot ask him about the Night's King, so instead she asks him about love, and fear, and this land he has known his whole life, though she has always been promised it is hers.

Two Targaryens, two coins tossed by the gods. One wavers between madness and greatness, one between love and duty, and they are bound; neither can fall until the other falls and so they are bound in paradox, waiting until something can tip the balance. He will not love her. He will not betray her.

The choice, then, is hers. Greatness and he will love her. Madness...

_There must always be a King of Winter_

_He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire_

He leans into the kiss, and she can feel the exact moment when he stops himself, pulls back from her embrace, wavers back towards duty but looks to her with love, unable to choose. Chained by prophecy and chained by the past, as she was once chained by hers. But she is free, and she can choose, and no slavery has ever felt more terrible than this freedom.

"Alright, then. Let it be fear." _Let it be madness._

She turns so he cannot see her tears, and walks to the beach before she can change her mind. She must be the one to tip the balance, to determine the fall of both coins, and he will never forgive her. She will never forgive herself. She hears Missandei's last words echoing in her mind, and meets Drogon with the wind in her hair and the salt in her eyes and the storm in her heart, and as they fly she looks back towards Dragonstone one last time, back towards her birthplace, her homecoming, her triumph and the last place she knew hope; and then she drags her gaze away and looks ahead, towards the fleet, towards the city. She can already smell the smoke.

The fleet burns too easily for the death of a dragon. She mourns Rhaegal with every flame, every scream, and her grief is echoed in Drogon's roars. The fleet knows their fury but it is no dragon; it is only wood and flesh and too soon it is ash beneath the waves and the hollow place within her still bleeds, and Rhaegal is still lost, Viserion is still lost. _Rhaegar is still lost. Viserys is still lost— No. If I look back I am lost._

And so she looks ahead, and as they reach King's Landing she wants to scream with everything inside her, with the grief and the pain and all the loss, with the secret that consumes her from within like a pyre, but all that comes out is a whisper, her voice already fading even if she must hold on to face what she will do. She opens her mouth to shape the word that will seal her sacrifice and claim the frayed remnants of her soul and condemn her to her forebears' fate.

The bells ring out and their music is almost her undoing. Her command dies in her throat, fire succumbing to music; determination to the desperate pleas of a city she has sworn to free, of people she was born to love; conviction to the memory of a music she never heard, a song never finished.

She could be merciful.

She could still choose greatness.

Her gaze is drawn back towards Dragonstone before she can stop herself, and tears fill her eyes as the agony of choice threatens to rend her to the ashes fire never could, to shatter her like ice. _If I look back I am lost,_ she begs herself, trying to pull air through her grief-ravaged throat to give the command that will end it all. And yet... _To go forward you must go back._

All are lost to her: her brothers, her dragons, her sun-and-stars, the love she has only just found, the land she has spent her whole life striving for and yet has never truly known. _If I look back I am lost_ she thinks, _and I must look back._

The bells ring louder than the wind in her ears or the storm in her heart and she finally understands. She must look back, to the memory unavenged, to the song unfinished, to the war unending. _Aerys,_ she thinks, and the word twists in her mind on the way to her lips and comes out familiar.

“ _Dracarys._ ”

The bells falter as fire blooms, as she fulfils the legacy of ashes that is her only true inheritance.

Once, she walked into a pyre, hoping it would consume her along with the wreckage of her love. Once, she walked into a pyre and instead birthed dragons. This, though—she feels every flame, and wonders that she is unburnt when the fire is within her and around her, consuming all that is left of her. _Only death can pay for life_

The bells fall silent as the city burns, and even the screams soon fade, and there is no music but memory, and the silence in her mind is louder than any cheering, any screams, any calls of acclaim or hatred, any battlefield.

The city burns and ash falls like snow and she can feel her mind coming undone with her heart, burned and bleeding and now silent, too silent.

 _If I look back—_ but she has. She has looked back, and gone back, and she is lost, and all she must do now is stay standing, hold the fraying pieces of herself together until they, too, can fall apart and drift like ashes.

_There must always be a King of Winter._

She looks to the Red Keep, but there is something she must do first. Carefully, as if every step could be her last, as if at any moment she could fall to pieces with nothing holding her together, she walks up the steps to face her people, her children, her future, her undoing.

This is her inheritance, this ash and smoke and silence, but she will leave them a different legacy. She will leave hope for them, even if there is none left for her. She will leave them a promise, that one who comes after may still choose greatness and remember her sacrifice. She will leave them memory. She is nothing, now, but she will leave them something to _be_ , here in this land so far from any of their homes. She owes them that; she owes the world that.

But she has chosen madness, and he must believe it if he is to betray her, if any of them are to betray her. There is still one final treason to be known and her entire being begs for it, the flames still devouring her from the inside. She will give them madness; it will hardly take pretense. No, it will be lasting long enough to convince them, holding her voice steady when all it wants to do is burn, that will take all her strength.

"Will you break the wheel with me?" She cries, and their adulation feels like another form of condemnation, but also like a promise, like the memory of hope.

_Will you remember me?_

She looks to Jon, then, and sees the horror in his eyes, and knows she has succeeded.

_Will you betray me?_

"Promise me, Jon," she whispers, soft as smoke, and turns away from him once more.

She climbs the charred steps of the Red Keep. The door is not red; she remembers vaguely that once, that was important to her. Nothing here is important now; the past is ashes and the future is ice, and she steps into the empty hall she has given everything to claim.

It is nothing like stepping onto the sands of Dragonstone. It does not feel like a homecoming; as she faces the throne that has written her fate, the throne that has torn her family apart for generations and left her here alone, to face their destiny and bring it at last to a close, it only feels like an ending.

The Iron Throne. It stands empty, cold; a mockery of her trials of fire to win the hearts of slaves and conquerors and ghosts, monsters and legends and people. Her people.

She has chosen madness, but...

_If I look back, I am lost_

She could still choose greatness. She could lead them to those promises; she could free the world. She could still choose his love. She could look ahead, put the flames behind her—

No. She has looked back, and brought the Targaryen legacy of fire and blood to a close with a final inferno.

But still she looks to the throne, and as ice fills her thoughts she dreams of a world made free.

Footsteps sound softly, muffled by ash, and she knows he has come. She has made her choice, and so she has written his, and he has come at last to betray her as prophecy has promised. As he must, to save them all. As she must betray him, in letting him believe it is his choice alone.

It is all too easy to play her part, for no word she says is a lie, and if he sees madness in her eyes—well, is it so far a cry from grief, from this inferno in her heart, the ice in her mind? And so here amidst the ashes and silence of her bitterest victory she paints him a picture of a world remade, and knows he will believe her beyond salvation, too lost to her dreams, too blind to the cost.

Perhaps he is right. She has never known these people, and though she fought beside them for the dawn, they will never love her; they will only ever fear her name and the history written before she was born. She knows that now, and turns instead to those who have fought for her, those she has freed, those she can still save. He mourns those who are lost, and maybe he is right. Perhaps the throne should have been his; perhaps it still can be. There must always be a King of Winter, after all, and she has had enough of fire.

Madness and greatness, and he almost believes her. When he kisses her it no longer tastes of hesitation or regret, and she tries not to wonder if to him it tastes of ashes. He kisses her like one surrendering love for the last time, as the bound coins fall and his fate must be treason for she has written it so. A Targaryen alone...indeed, it would be terrible, if there were none bound to her, for who would end her then?

He kisses her and she hardly feels the knife as he falls to his betrayal, the terrible wavering balance righted at last.

"Thank you," she whispers, and wonders if he will hear, and knows it will not matter: he will never forgive either of them.

The last thing she hears is Drogon's ragged cry.

*******

His vision flickers as he looks down at her, at her blood staining her ashes, and he blinks to rid his eyes of tears, but his eyes no longer blink and within him there is no longer ice but fire and he lifts his wings—

—and comes back to himself, vision twisting once more as the dragon above him roars its pain and he is dragged by the sound once more into—

—that shifting vision, and when he looks down he sees _himself_ and knows he looks through the dragon's eyes, through Drogon's eyes, and the dragon's grief is an immense, burning thing; enough to burn the city a thousand times over and still not be sated. It is too much and he tears himself away—

—and watches through his own eyes once more but with no lessening of grief, and wonders how she held it within her when her dragons fell, when Missandei fell, when—

—He nudges her gently with his snout, then again when she still does not move, and the agony builds within him like inferno—

—and he is thrown back into himself as Drogon rears and fire glows in his throat. Jon stares him down and stands his ground, ready to accept the dragon's judgement in lieu of his queen's, ready to drown in the fires of the grief they share.

But at the last moment Drogon turns his head and Jon watches as those thousand swords melt, as the Iron Throne is unmade, and wonders if his strange desire to laugh means he is mad as well.

He can _feel_ her in his claws even as he watches her vanish into the distance—and when he turns back, all that is left is blood on snow. No, he reminds himself. Not snow.

He is still standing there, upon the ruins of the throne his father fought for and yet never held, vision flickering between the ashes before him and the sea below him, when they come to take him away.

He spends little time within the prison walls, in truth. Now that he has known the dragon's mind he finds it all too easily, as if the grief and the anger and the unforgivable have created a link between them that he is powerless to resist. He flies north with Drogon, with his queen, and cries his pain to the sea and sky alike. He flies north, and in the part of him that is not numb with the ice within him or burned to ash by the dragon's grief he feels something like surprise as that flight carries them to the wall—

—and his vision is wrenched sideways once again but this time when he opens his eyes it is in a familiar shape, though still not his own. _Ghost?_ he asks, and knows the answering touch of the wolf's mind. _Where...?_ And as the wolf turns its head, he knows.

They sit outside the godswood beyond the Wall, where long ago and in another lifetime Jon Snow swore his vows. The weirwoods look on in judgement or in patience, and Ghost stares back, and together they watch until a shadow crosses the sky. And then Ghost lifts his head and howls, and the dragon cries back, and Jon feels the stinging of tears in his own eyes, as if across a great distance.

Drogon dives, and Jon watches through Ghost's eyes as he vanishes amongst the weirwoods. If he could feel anything but numb agony he might wonder why Drogon has brought her here, so far from the summers of her home and farther still from any gods she might claim, but such questions pass across his mind without evoking the faintest curiosity, though he spares a moment for a single desperate prayer to the old gods of the Starks, the old gods of winter, to give his queen a gentler death than they gave him.

When Drogon emerges from the weirwood grove his claws are empty. Jon reaches for his mind more by instinct than conscious thought but finds nothing as Drogon circles once, twice, again. Still Ghost is motionless at the edge of the grove.

And then once more Drogon unleashes fire, this time on the trees themselves and Jon and Ghost watch as the sap runs like blood, streaming from the carved eyes of the trees before all is consumed in the inferno of a dragon's grief.

Ghost watches unmoving as the dragonfire melts the snow around him, watches unmoving as Drogon ceases his merciless jet of flame, all the trees of the grove alight, and rises, rises, and then at last turns east. Ghost tries to look back to the grove, then, but Jon wills him to follow the dragon's flight until Drogon vanishes from sight. The dragon's mind is closed to him, still, and the wolf is fighting him too, and his own mind is still too wounded, too scarred by grief and guilt, to keep resisting.

So Ghost turns them back to face the burning grove, and what he sees throws Jon out of the wolf's mind and back into his own body with the force of its sheer impossibility. Mind reeling, head throbbing where he threw it back against the stone walls of the cell, Jon reaches out blindly again, frantically seeking Ghost's mind to see what he knows he cannot have seen.

And yet.

A figure emerges from the flames, stepping from the ashes of the weirwoods to the snow surrounding them. A figure with silver hair turned white with frost, purple eyes gone blue with cold, and a tear in her gown stained by blood but beneath which there is no wound, not even a scar.

She emerges from the pyre a creature of winter, yet there is life in her gaze as if the fire in her veins is not extinguished but instead battles with the ice, or balances it.

She emerges from the pyre changed and yet whole, and looks into the wolf's eyes as Ghost stands at last and walks to her. Her hands are cold as they reach into Ghost's fur, but there is recognition in her eyes as they meet Ghost's, meet _his_.

She turns north, away from the Wall; the Queen of Winter, claiming the crown of the lost King who had no fire within him to balance the ice. She surveys her kingdom and through Ghost's eyes he sees her almost smile. Here, she can be loved. Here, she can bring balance, tempering the icy fury of winter with the warmth of her fire. Here at last is a land that can accept from her the mercy it never knew from her predecessor. Here at last she is free from the legacy of those who came before.

Ghost follows his queen.

A key turning in the lock of his cell jolts him back to his own body once more, incredulity and disbelief warring with grief within him. The city is still silent with the dead, and his queen's blood still stains his hands. But she is undying, and a Queen of Winter now reigns; the war for the dawn at last ended, as his father's war and his grandfather's crimes are now ended at last.

It is easy to take the oath again, for it holds a new meaning now. It is easy to board the boat, for he leaves only sorrow behind, and turns instead towards a promise.

And so Jon takes his post, as her watcher on the Wall, as the wolf at her side and the dragon in her skies, and always she is his queen.

*******

They begin as rumours and end as songs, the stories of the dragon and the wolf, the queen and the bastard, the last of the Targaryens, the saviours of the realm.

They begin as blue winter roses gathered from the Wall where once nothing grew, as silver strings on a harp long silent, as whispers in the rebuilt halls of a kingdom renewed, as a wolf's red eyes and a dragon's black wings and a queen's silver hair.

They fade into legend and song, into stories of the silver Queen of Winter crowned in blue roses, and the ( _—wolf— dragon—_ ) at her side who turns by moonlight to a black-cloaked king. Stories of a bastard who ( _—broke— kept—_ ) his oaths, and refused the throne his father ( _—won—lost—refused—was denied_ ). Stories of a ( _—girl—woman—monster—_ ) who birthed dragons and broke chains and ( _—went mad—was betrayed—surrendered to fate—chose her path_ ).

They end as songs who began as children, and the facts are lost to time but still the truth remains, and the winters are followed always by summers, balanced and merciful, to show the land a new way and another chance.

They are the ones who were promised, and theirs is the song that is sung. The changing seasons are their promise and the land's freedom is their legacy and theirs is the song of ice and fire.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so once again I'm back on my 'no, wait, I can make this work' bullshit because it _could have worked_. Thanks to Meg for beta-ing, and also for making me sit down and actually write the damn thing in the first place.


End file.
